Twenty-one years on, St Jerome’s Laneway no longer feels like the scrappy younger sibling of the Big Day Out; it feels like its rebirth. From its UniSA courtyard beginnings, past the salt air of Hart’s Mill and through Bonython Park, it has now comfortably colonised the Adelaide Showgrounds. The site suits it. Wide skies, agricultural bones, and, this year, the best VIP set-up in memory: air-conditioning, phone chargers, Belle’s Hot Chicken frying Nashville sandwiches, and dual projection screens capturing cinematic close-ups from every angle so you could sit in the grandstand and still feel inside the pit.
At 31 degrees, it was a day built for linen shirts, white sneakers and sunscreen. But it was also a day about identity; how artists construct it, shed it, parody it, and sometimes burn it down.
Cavetown opened the emotional register early. Robin Skinner, the Cambridge-born songwriter who built his audience quietly online before stepping onto global stages, arrived with long ginger braids, a faintly mischievous dirty mo, spider tattoos inked across his knees, butterflies on his guitar and a rainbow strap slung over his shoulder. He dedicated a song skyward for Valentine’s Day, hoping it might reach his girlfriend. “Doesn’t have to be so hard,” he sang, a line that landed with the particular earnestness that makes his crowd feel seen. When he asked if the audience had “morsels of zoomies” left for the final stretch, they delivered. By the time he reached “Devil Town,” devil horns were raised and sulphur-thick smoke poured from the machines as he dropped to the ground, kicking his legs mid-riff like a kid possessed by pure joy. His set felt like adolescence made communal and safe; vulnerability weaponised into belonging.
That theme of vulnerability: who gets to claim it, who profits from it, who performs it, ran quietly through the afternoon. Gigi Sanchez, in white tank and blue jeans with a brown leather belt and bandana flapping loose, filled the showground with organ swells that seemed to freeze bodies in place. Malcolm Todd followed with the self-aware grin of a man who knows he is both protagonist and punchline. Announcing the Australian leg nearly done, taking a shot of vodka at 3pm, he sang about wanting to be better. about becoming a better man, with a wink that didn’t quite hide the ache.
Mt Joy widened the lens. The Philadelphia band, named after a mountain but carrying the weightless sprawl of Americana, played like artists who believe the road is both sanctuary and question mark. “Maybe there’s no heaven; maybe we’re all alone together,” Matt Quinn offered at one point, and it felt less like lyric and more like thesis.. Their songs about highways and queens and small-town ghosts blurred into something timeless.
Oklou’s set shifted the temperature again. Decks and synths perched on a stark white platform that occasionally became a stage, her performance was minimalist but charged. Performers would step forward to shred a guitar line or lightly ding a triangle; so French, so chi; before dissolving back into atmosphere. It was electronic music that breathed rather than bludgeoned.
Lucy Dacus grounded the day. The Richmond, Virginia songwriter — one third of boygenius — commands without theatrics. When chants of “Free Palestine” rippled through the crowd, she responded simply: “If I could, I would.” She debuted a new song with the line, “Life is just a series of close calls,” and later mused that she doesn’t know what she thinks until she starts talking. There was a moment where she asked who had a Valentine and suggested someone find one during the next song playful; but tinged with the sense that love itself is precarious. Heat pressed in. She said she was half out of her body by the end, but her voice never fractured. Her songs about planting tomatoes, about being hot and heavy, about the delicate crime of partnership, they felt lived rather than constructed.
Role Model brought hips and swagger, a young Springsteen but with more arm tattoos, while Wet Leg detonated satire. Lime green translucent guitar. Bikini top stamped with medical crosses. Pink hair strutting a runway. Baby-doll voices flipping into snarls. “I don’t need no dating apps,” they sang, front double-biceps pose locked in. A crowd scream in the middle of a line cut through like a release valve. Where Cavetown’s vulnerability felt gentle, Wet Leg’s felt barbed; parodying desire while owning it.
Wolf Alice delivered precision. Ellie Rowsell’s voice moved from feral howl to pop coo in seconds. Split-leg flares, white crop top and that uncanny ability to pivot from rage to tenderness without warning. Their crowd was thinner; fans were already lining up for Chappell Roan. but those who stayed were rewarded with a masterclass in control.
And then Chappell Roan detonated the atmosphere entirely. Pink fluffy cowboy hats dotted the field like punctuation marks. Flames burst during “Pink Pony Club.” She serenaded a cute, monstrous, gestating creature and made theatricality feel not indulgent but necessary. She makes most of her contemporaries look underdressed. She makes the concept of camp feel devotional. Watching her move through “Red Wine Supernova” and “Good Luck, Babe!” felt like witnessing the crystallisation of the next iteration of Gaga or Madonna but filtered through queer Midwest longing and TikTok fluency. It was perhaps the first Laneway where the fanbase itself felt like spectacle; unified in costume, lyric and ritual.
Throughout the day, the through-line was performance as identity construction. Cavetown’s softness, Dacus’s quiet resolve, Wet Leg’s irony, Roan’s maximalist theatre; each offered a different answer to the same question: how do you be a person, publicly, now? Some asked gently. Some screamed it. Some wrapped it in satire. Some set it on fire.
Laneway at the Showgrounds feels grown up, but not older. It is sleeker, more technically accomplished, better catered. Yet it still trades in discovery. The festival that once felt like a niche indie pilgrimage now feels culturally central. In the heat, under smoke and pink hats and organ swells, it managed something rare; it felt like the present tense.
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